How do You Find Out What Your Customers Want?

You could just ask, but that wouldn’t give you a product or service worth the money you might put into it - 50 to 90% of the product and service initiatives by US companies are failures. This costs in the magnitude of $100b per year.

And that’s taking into account that these companies have adopted customer-driven thinking. Innovation needs to be outcome-driven to create breakthrough products and services, writes Anthony Ulwick in What Customers Want.

Ulwick encourages us to think about how customers see the world. They:

- buy products and services to help them get jobs done- use a set of metrics (performance measures) to judge how well a job is getting done and how a product performs

These metrics therefore make it possible for companies to approach the creation of breakthrough products and services in a systematic and predictable manner. The companies that figure out what jobs customers want to get done and how they measure success in getting the job done have a leg up.

That advantage may translate into profit. This methodology comes at a cost - that of having to think differently about innovation, learn new skills, and give up asking customers directly how they’d like to see a product improved, for example.

The author concludes the book with ten tactical tips that have helped companies overcome some intrinsic barriers to success. Among them:

1. Separate the roles and the information-related needs of marketing and development.2. Treat the adoption of outcome-driven innovation as an investment in infrastructure.3. Share needed information across the organization.4. Repurpose the customer satisfaction study.5. Treat the discovered opportunity as sacred.

Bottom line, it takes a little more than just asking to find out what customers really want. Innovation is a process and it is constantly evolved by practice.